PhotoShrinker Lets You Quickly Free Up Space On Your Smartphone

For those struggling with smartphones that seem to be constantly running out of storage space, a new application called PhotoShrinker can help. The app lets you free up space on your iPhone or Android smartphone by compressing photos up to 1/10th of their original size, potentially freeing up gigs of space, and making room for new photos or videos, apps, games, movies, music and more.

The newly shrunken photos can still be shared out to social networks like Facebook and Instagram, where they’ll look the same. It’s just that the photos on your phone won’t be as large in size as before.

This simple utility comes at a time when a number of iPhone users have chosen to skip upgrading to iOS 8. Recent data from Apple shows that only 56% of iOS users have moved to the company’s newest mobile operating system version, and that percentage has only increased by 4 percentage points since October. In comparison, iOS 7 climbed to 78% adoption at its peak.

The problem, many speculate, is that the iOS 8 upgrade requires a lot of free space in order to install over-the-air – forcing users to delete apps and data in order to make room.

Using the app is simple. After installing and launching, you can either tap on the photos you want to shrink one-by-one or choose “select all” to shrink all photos at once. (Remember to uncheck those you might want to make high-quality prints out of later on, because those will need to remain in their original versions.) You then confirm the shrink and the app will save the now-smaller photos to your Camera Roll while the originals are deleted.

Note that on iOS, deleted photos are moved to a “Recently Deleted” album that the iPhone automatically clears out in 30 days. The app also offers users a tutorial that shows them how to delete photos from this album immediately. On Android, however, the photos are instantly deleted for you.

PhotoShrinker needs iOS 8 to work, so it can’t help you with this particular iOS upgrade but it could help with the next one.

The app offers both a free and paid version, where the former limits users to 500 photos at a time and includes a banner advertisement at the bottom of the screen. The paid version removes the ads and the limitations.

The two-person team behind PhotoShrinker didn’t originally come from tech backgrounds, one co-founder tells us. Instead they studied finance and marketing and ended up working in marketing at Google and at a hedge fund. But more recently, the two quit their jobs, taught themselves mobile development and bootstrapped their way to profitability in five months. They now have a line up of apps including SwiftPic, VaporMail Anonymous Email, HexGame and even a Yo parody app called Sup, among others.